Warren Murphy: The Seventh Stone

He was told to be reasonable. You asked nicely first, and then if the man didn't go, you broke his feet with a pipe. Then you called the police and an ambulance and they took him away. Maybe if he was real fresh, you broke his mouth too.

"Get outta here," said Gonzalez y Gonzalez y Gonzalez. That counted as the second warning. He was to give three. Gonzalez kept two fingers pressed against the little transmitter inside his booth. That way he wouldn't lose count. He had one more warning to go.

"No," said Remo.

"What?"

"I'm not going. I'm here to finish your patron," Remo said. "I am going to kill him and humiliate him. I've been told his children are here also."

"What?" grunted Gonzalez. It must be three by now. He reached for the man's neck. Suddenly his large hands left the transmitter and froze there in front of the man's neck. Gonzalez looked at his hands. The fingers he had been counting with were out there in midair. He had lost his place and now he wasn't sure if it had been three warnings or not.

"Hey, how many times I tell you to get out of here?" Gonzalez asked. Maybe the stranger would remember.

"I'm not leaving. I've got business with your patron."'

"No, no," said Gonzalez. "I want to know exactly how many times I warned you to get outta here. What was it? One? Was it two?"

"I don't know," said Remo. "There was the first 'get outta here.' "

"Right. Thass one."

"I think there was another," Remo said.

"Okay. Three," Gonzalez said.

"No, that's two," Remo said.

"So you got one more."

"For what?" said Remo.

"For the three times I warn you before the surprise," said Gonzalez. He was being cunning. "Okay, here comes the third. Get you ass outta here before I break you feet."

"No," said Remo. Gonzalez went for the hammer. He liked to hear bones break, liked to feel them give way to a good solid swing. Gonzalez reached his free hand to grab the insolent stranger while he swung the hammer toward the groin. There was a strange light feeling to the hand that gripped the stranger and that was because it wasn't gripping anything anymore. It was gone, and the stranger didn't seem to move.

But Gonzalez's left arm ended at a gushing stump. Then the window shield of his guard booth closed and the door opened and he saw where his hand had gone. It came flying back into his lap.

He had not seen the stranger move because the other movement was so perfectly symmetrical with his own. He had only seen the hammer. He could not perceive an incredible velocity from the stranger's hand, cutting through his wrist like a scissor separating breakfast sausage, severing bone from bone with such awesome speed that Gonzalez did not even have time to feel pain.

There was only the lightness, and then the hand in his lap, and then everything became dark forever. He did not see the finishing blow to his head. His last thought was a stunning clear vision of reality. He saw a vision of a transmitter in front of his eyes. He saw two fingers on it. He was at two. That was his place. Two warnings. He would remember that if the subject came up again.

It didn't.

Remo felt the dogs before he heard them or saw them. There was a way dogs had about them of being unleashed for an attack. Dogs were pack animals, and while they could be trained for other things, they worked best in groups. On the other hand, man had to be trained to work in a group. And then there were a few other men, down through the centuries, who had been trained to excel alone, to use all the physical powers that a man's body could command, and those were the ones who could sense dogs loping across a vast lawn preparing for an attack.

Remo was one of those men. The only other was his trainer, and Remo's training had been so pure that he no longer had to think about the things he knew. To think about something was not to know it. To do something without knowing how one did it was the full knowledge of one's own body.

The normal human body would tense when perceiving an attack. That was because it had succumbed to the bad habit of using muscles and strength. When the dogs set forepaws for the leap, Remo felt a softness in the air, almost as if watching himself. He let his left arm level out by itself with palm upward, catching the underbelly of the dog and pressuring slightly so that its leap went two feet too far, two feet above his head. He passed the other two dogs, one at each side, like a matador.

From the window of the great white house with the orange roof, a man watched through binoculars. He rubbed the lenses because he was sure he had not seen what he had seen. If his binoculars were not playing tricks, he had just seen his three prize attack dogs leap at a man and not only miss, but seem to go right through him. The man did not change pace; nor did he change expression.

There was Lobo, Rafael and Berserka, each with a blood kill in their mouths by the time their training had been completed, and they had run through that stranger.

Was he carrying something special?

What could he carry? He wore only a black T-shirt and black slacks and loafers. He also wore a smile. Apparently he knew he was being watched because he mouthed again the words: "You're dead."

Lobo pulled up short on the lawn and, true to his great Doberman heart, whirled to attack again. And this time it was as if he had run into a wall. He stopped. Flat. On the ground. Lifeless. A useless dog, thought the man with the binoculars. Rafael would do better. Rafael had once ripped out a lumberjack's throat with one jerk of his mastiff neck.

Rafael roared toward the man's groin. Rafael roared right on by in two pieces. Mastiff's master watched his dog die and thought: "All my life, I have been robbed by dog dealers. Let there be one day that does not betray Juan Valdez Garcia and then I will admit there is justice under heaven."

Juan Valdez prayed rarely and never without some prospect of success. He was not a man who would ask a favor of the Almighty without believing it was in the Almighty's best interest to deliver. Juan Valdez was not, after all, some pathetic peasant who would ask for the impossible, like altering an incurable disease.

Juan allowed the Almighty a likely opportunity to perform this service for him. After all, had he not twice placed gold candlesticks in the churches of Bogota and Popayan? He was not a man to treat God to mere copper.

Having paid for services, Juan Valdez now expected those services to be returned. It was a simple prayer that came from his lips, one that was honest and true:

"God, I want that gringo in Berserka's teeth. Or else I calling in the candlesticks."

Juan focused the binoculars a bit more tightly. It would be good to see Berserka kill. She did not finish off quickly, unlike his other dogs, who went for the throat. Berserka could kill like a cat when she had a person helpless. Berserka, who had once shredded two men with rifles and sent a third fleeing handless into the jungles in Juan's early days of harvesting coca leaf, now darted toward the gringo's ankle. Berserka had teeth like a shark and haunches like a rhino. Her paws dug up lawn as she drove toward the man's loafers. And then she twisted with the full weight of her body to jerk him off his feet.

But she was twisting in air, a 180-pound dog bouncing around in the man's hands like a puppy. And he was stroking her belly and he was saying something Juan Valdez made out by lip-reading. He was saying: "Nice doggy."

And then he put her down and she walked, tail wagging behind the heels she was supposed to have upended. Juan gasped. There was Berserka, who had chewed on more entrails than he could count, happily walking behind this man who had invaded his home. Juan did not care anymore where he was. It was his home. So what if it was in America? It was his home and the machine guns would have to be used.